broadcast me a joyful noise

Well, I just cast my vote in my very first federal election (having missed the last one by a month). I expect tammaiya's 21st tonight to be a grand mixture of fun, frivolity, and drunken law students bawling enthusiastically at the TV screens.

In other news, ( final semester results are out! )

And now: YULETIDE *cracks knuckles*

My life, ladies and gents.

Oh my god, you guys. I just - just - worked out what a 'strip mall' is. (We don't have a specific name for that here.) And...it's a familiar phrase, so I must have been reading it in books and fanfic and stuff for a while, but I...I think I must have been just vaguely associating it with strip clubs in my head? ALL THIS TIME.

*laughing*

See, I read so fast sometimes that individual words don't actually get registered, just the overall meaning of a sentence or a paragraph, and it took me getting a brief wafting mental image of strippers to actually slow down, back up, and work out what the phrase actually meant.

How weird.

I am tired and bored and my head aches from methodical absorption of parasitology and anatomy, and I still have a whole section on tapeworms (how thrilling) and another on the respiratory system (slightly more thrilling) to get through before the end of the day. All the books I'm in the middle of require too much thought, so I think I might go and drown myself in Under Milk Wood for a while. Whatever would I do without Dylan Thomas.

I kind of want comments. How about we play Picspam Of Stuff That Is Hot?

( Here, I'll go first )

Ow, ow, ow, I am typing and clicking the mouse with my middle finger at the moment because my poor index finger is developing a bruise from the vicious disposable lancet that we used to get a blood sample during my parasitology lab. I wasn't sure if I'd bleed well because I have kind of shitty peripheral circulation sometimes, but, well, I bled. Boy, did I ever! No modest drops welling up on the skin for me, no, my finger got really into the whole thing and started gushing everywhere. It was hilarious because I was the first person to get my finger pricked, and I was standing there chatting to my lab partner as she calmly pipetted the sample into an epi, and there was blood just streaming down between my fingers and everyone else in the queue for pricking looked kind of like: o_O

Er, I've realised that I've been talking more than usual about things like body parts and blood and dead people, all of which I find to be very cool, but...are you guys all right with it? Am I upsetting anyone? I can make an effort to put things behind cuts if you'd prefer.

Anyway, tomorrow I am taking the bus to and from Sydney for the USyd open day. I need to inspect a couple of res colleges (I am not living in the same corridor as a horde of drunken undergrads) and pick up some Arts/Law pamphlets for my brother. Arts/Law at USyd requires a completely ridiculous UAI, something like 99.85, but he's crazy smart (just got 100% for his HSC musicology essay) so he's got a fair shot.

USyd gets NO love, however, for the online administrative snafu that gave me a minor heart attack ten minutes ago: having booked my interview slot as soon as I got the email, and then promptly snapped up one of the last two non-refundable discount bus fares for that day, I arrived home this afternoon to an email explaining that there'd been an error and could I please re-book my interview?

Me: ASDJKADGDAJQ!!!

But there were still some places left in my preferred slot. Thank goodness. WELL DONE, USYD. THIS HAD BETTER NOT SET THE TONE FOR THE REST OF OUR LONG AND BEAUTIFUL FRIENDSHIP.

This is completely and vehemently not the detailed update you're looking for; well, perhaps not vehemently, as that implies a certain amount of energy, and I am existing in a state of rarefied exhaustion brought on by a mild cold and a weekend spent gadding my merry way around the Melbourne CBD. And tomorrow I need to spend frantically doing the two assignments that I neglected in favour of said gadding. So...this update will be lacking in depth.

Melbourne was visited. Anthony Warlow's Phantom was attended, and I know I won't be able to do justice to that experience with my current level of brain functioning, so I'll just say that it was sublime. I ate a lot of nice food and read I, Lucifer which was even better than I expected it to be and now I will resent Glen Duncan forever for writing the book that SHOULD HAVE BEEN MINE TO WRITE, DAMN IT.

( Money was spent. )

I may not be around a lot for the next week - heaps to do. Alas, I hear you all say, with a sad shake of the head, she's returning to her default state of only being online at wildly sporadic and perpetually inconvenient intervals!

Which, well, mea culpa. You know how life goes.

I tell you this: if I make it though this anatomy course without my brain exploding from the sheer number of words and facts and images I am going to have to cram into it, it will be a miracle. A miracle that will result in me feeling smugly well-educated, as though waltzing into a cocktail party and casually listing the features of the C1 vertebra is going to win me any friends at all.

Fahye: *in highly put-upon tones* Today we did the vertebral column! In 50 minutes! All of it.
Mum: There, there.
Fahye: This is possibly the one week of my life where having a father who is a spine surgeon could actually benefit me academically. So of course he is in India being world-famous and knowledgable about spines to other people.
Mum: Well, he has a plastic model of the spine at his office, we could go and get that. And we also own an entire set of bones that could help you study for the practical exam.
Fahye: ...oh.
Mum: *enters Dad's study and emerges moments later with a plastic baggie full of, yes, vertebrae* Here you go! They're numbered and everything!
Fahye: *weakly* I don't know if I ever thanked you properly for raising me and feeding me and letting me play with your set of real human bones.

Real bones, you guys, this is so awesome.

Anyway, you know what this means, don't you?

Yes. Yes. Everything I write for the next five months is going to be crammed full of anatomical terms and thus be absurdly indecipherable, and I will glee quietly to myself and pretend that describing the muscles of Sam Winchester's back using the proper medical terminology counts as studying. What. What. He has a nice back. DON'T JUDGE.

...wow, I fucked that 60% exam up but good.

Ugh. And I was in such a jubilant mood last night.

I'm off to study for the two neuroscience exams now. If anyone wants to comment-spam me with joyful screencaps or tiny snippets of fic or babble about characters that I love, that would be really nice.

While everyone in the US seems to be starting jobs this week (gainful employment! well done, folken!), I am wondering how long I can delude myself into forgetting that my major exams are less than a week away. OH, STUVAC. Such a deceptive dichotomy of laziness and panic.

I'm off to make myself a meal that by this point I do not think I can reasonably call breakfast, and then attempt to organise a semester's worth of assignments and lecture notes and lab handouts into a form that I can start to study from.

In the meantime, have a meme that (thankfully) has no chance of exploding into long crazy drabbles:

Name a pairing that I am familiar with, in a fandom I am familiar with, and I will write one line for that pairing and fandom.

And speaking of one-sentence fics, rawles has gone on a sublime spree of capslock with one-sentence fics/personal canon/hilarious reasons why characters suck. Contains spoilers for Heroes, BSG, PotC:AWE, The Office and Avatar, and is a wonderful mess of glee shot through with snarky rage.

Me: Shit, I'm such a procrastinator, I just watched three episodes of Friends instead of working. I am so unproductive.
Me: Hang on, that equates to...an hour of free time. ONE HOUR.

Dear Buddha, please bring me a pony SOME PERSPECTIVE.

GAMSAT results come out later this week. I didn't think I was worried, but my body has decided that I am, so for the past three nights I have had insomnia combined with unpleasant squirming in my stomach. Let's review the things I have to get done before the end of the month:

- mark another ten or so calculus papers (supposedly by tomorrow. HA. we'll see.)
- do five HORRIBLE assignments
- put together resume + addressing-of-criteria + references + ubiquitious piles of paperwork for my application for the DHA Graduate Program next year
- apply for medical schools & residential colleges at said medical schools
- lots of other juggling balls like tutoring jobs and skating judging and choir rehearsals, all of which I am kind of wishing I could just drop and let shatter

And then: exams! Hahahaha.

I...this has not been a good year so far. BUCK UP, 2007.

It's freezing in here. I'm going to go and get some tea.

hi lj can't stop & chat too busy even for capitalisation uni is eating ENTIRE LIFE hurrah(?)

less than two months to go of year 3 semester 1. existing on coffee (and prospect of three blissful weeks without stress).

hate: windows movie maker aka the scarlet whore. uni administration snafus --> paycheque being three weeks late. walking between campus and city bus interchange lugging 3kg journals. distressing lack of anything resembling a) sufficient sleep, b) exercise.

love: missy higgins. peppermint green tea. my sister. sunsets that start at 3:30pm and get greyer and thinner and fainter and more lovely.